Mark Landsbaum: Electric cars for an ice age?

Call it global warming schizophrenia. It's the disconnect between what really is happening and what global warming alarmists demand must happen.

For example, many government officials and government-paid scientists insist the world risks being incinerated because humans generate a little more carbon dioxide than they used to. But they completely ignore the reality that CO2 hasn't proved to be a threat, let alone the horrific danger they make it out to be.

Why must they pretend this fiction to be true? Because so much rides on it.

For instance, to force private carmakers to manufacture expensive, largely undesired, generally underperforming "zero-emission" electric cars, the California Air Resources Board must subscribe to the fiction that normal gasoline-powered cars are a threat to global temperatures.

The CARB air-police bullies last week mandated that, within six years, 15 percent of all vehicles sold in California must be of the zero-emission variety to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent. That's 15 times more of that kind of car than is sold today. The entire justification for this coercion of the private sector is based on the false contention that increasing greenhouse gases will result in dangerous, soaring temperatures worldwide. That's so much piffle.

Absent from CARB's calculus is the inconvenient fact that 16 noteworthy scientists published a letter this week in the Wall Street Journal pointing out that "carbon dioxide is not a pollutant" and that the natural, trace gas actually benefits the planet, which is what they used to teach in schools in the pre-Al Gore era. The unelected bureaucrats at the air board don't even hint at what those scientists say flatly, which is: "There's no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to 'decarbonize' the world's economy."

Why do these scientists not fear carbon emissions? Because carbon emissions don't pose a threat.

The air police also don't consider news that, despite CO2 emissions increasing dramatically over the past 15 years, temperatures haven't. Even the hotbed of global warming propaganda, Britain's Climate Research Unit, and England's Meteorological Office in a veritable whisper had to concede in recent days that not only isn't it getting much hotter, as global warming theory says it must, it's not getting warmer at all.

Worse yet (for the alarmists' cause), the "Met" says we may be entering a historic solar energy lull "to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the [frozen-over] Thames in the 17th century."

That era, by the way, is commonly referred to as the Little Ice Age. Not exactly global warming run amok.

Why must the global warming establishment ignore reality?

Because, they are government potentates whose power and control expands only if warming is a threat. They are government-funded researchers, who conveniently come up with contorted computer models to allegedly prove that warming Armageddon looms, which, not so coincidentally, earns them more government grant money. They are highly subsidized industries that otherwise couldn't pay the rent, let alone turn a profit, without their government checks.

As 16 scientists put it last week in the Wall Street Journal: "Follow the money."

As we have been fond of saying since Day 1 of this farcical saga, global warming never has been about the Earth getting too hot. It's always been about control and money: their control and your money.

It's for those reasons that despite mounting scientific opposition, and despite observable evidence flatly contradicting their predictions of doom, the disconnect persists.

That explains how President Barack Obama can make a not-so-veiled campaign appearance last week in Las Vegas, pushing for more federal subsidies for "clean energy" vehicles by stopping at a UPS facility in his motorcade of 22 fossil-fuel-burning vehicles.

These people aren't even subtle. Warmist-in-Chief Al Gore shamelessly sported a carbon footprint the size of a small town with his 10,000-square-foot Tennessee home and its $1,200-a-month electric bill in 2006 for burning 191,000 kilowatt hours, and a comparable $9 million domicile in Montecito, adjacent to Santa Barbara, burning the carbon candle at both ends, as it were.

They belie their professed mission with such hypocrisy. Occasionally, they reveal their true motives.

For instance, Gov. Jerry Brown announced last week that he has found a way to finance the state's ill-conceived, $98.5 billion electrified high-speed train, which virtually every honest analyst who has examined it says can't be built for its estimated price, won't enough attract riders to pay for itself and will disrupt and displace many communities along hundreds of miles of proposed track. The governor says he can help pay for this boondoggle, which we've dubbed the Moonbeam Express, by collecting carbon cap-and-trade fees from Californians.

This is just another denial of reality. The train is a boondoggle that will never be affordable to build or to operate, just as ethanol never became a viable alternative "clean energy" substitute, despite billions in taxpayer subsidies. Nevertheless, the train will be advanced by the governor in the haughty cause to "reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

Despite such proclamations, an inevitable stain remains, as we have seen with biofuels. Congress finally tired of milking taxpayers to subsidize the manufacture of the fuels, which turned out to be far less green than billed and created bundles of problematic unintended consequences. Nevertheless, the New York Times reported that companies must pay millions in penalties to the Treasury because they can't mix a special biofuel blend into their gasoline as required. They can't because the subsidized concoction no longer is made because the subsidies ended in December.

"Penalizing the fuel suppliers demonstrates what happens when the federal government really, really wants something that technology is not ready to provide," wrote a Times reporter – not opinion writer. Mind you, these are penalties for, as the Times put it, "failing to do the impossible."

It takes much effort to arrive at such a foolish and costly end game, but that's what happens when the government "really, really wants" what normal people don't.

It's anyone's guess how absurd – and costly – the Moonbeam Express will end up being when, as may well happen, only half its tracks are laid because taxpayers reach their tolerance limit, as they did with biofuels. What will the end game look like for Californians and U.S. taxpayers, who also will be asked to pick up some of the cost?

There's no telling what economic catastrophes will be wrought by the California air board's insistence that carmakers invest in vehicles that can barely find buyers, even with huge taxpayers subsidies, let alone without them.

What's important to remember is that none of this is foisted on us for the stated lofty reasons. The globe will warm and cool, as it always has. People will drive normal vehicles, as they have for more than a century. Too few people will use a high-speed choo choo to traverse California's relatively sparsely populated expanses for the train to pay for itself, if it's ever even fully constructed.

But money will be drained out of private hands and redistributed to favored constituencies like government-paid climate researchers and crony capitalists bellying up for subsidized paychecks. Steering it all will be hypocritical politicians and their armies of dictatorial bureaucrats doing what they love to do most, controlling.